Blackout affecting Brazilian property owners blamed on storms
Brazilian property owners left without electricity earlier this week have been told that the blackout was caused by storms.
Nearly 60 million people had their power cut on November 10th in 18 of Brazil’s 26 states for up to four hours.
However, energy minister Edison Lobao played down fears about the reliability of the country’s power grid, blaming the incident on heavy storms, lightening and strong winds that made transformers on a high voltage transmission line short circuit.
Mr Lobao added that two other lines went down as part of an automatic safety mechanism.
Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva also backed the country’s infrastructure and said that "there was no shortage of power generation and the problem was not a lack of transmission lines".
Among guarantees to the International Olympic Committee, Brazil said that they would make sure that Rio de Janeiro is isolated from the nation’s power system to avoid problems like this when it hosts the 2016 Games.
Six years ago the US suffered a similar power cut which affected 50 million people in states such as New York and parts of Canada.
